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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#351

Post by newsgremlin »

theobeers wrote: post #50
The_rationalist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

Nothing, of course. Anything that could be done with Flash in its heyday can be done better (in several senses) with modern tools. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative page…

Talking about this to certain devs is like talking to them about sports. They just don't get the learning curve was the most accessable for the average user, not just those who know how to program.

We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect for the other side of the brain.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#352

Post by neop1x »

What prevents someone to replicate the Flash experience with modern web tech like JS, HTML5, CSS or Canvas/WebGL? I mean something with similar editor functionality, producing result drawable in modern web browsers. EDIT: There actually is Adobe Animate so what prevents people from being as creative as in the Flash era?! https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#353

Post by MarvelousWololo »

ehsankia wrote: post #145
buboard wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> web as a whole has grown up and changed eh, no it hasnt, and even if it did it would have nothing to do with flash. Flash was a great domain-specific tool for somthing that is significantly more cumbersome to write (and difficult to debug, and less wysiwyg) in canvas. Plus technology is supposed to move forward and 20 years is a geologic timespan in internet years. We expected to have much, much better tools by now…

Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games. Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube…

Unity impose hardware constraints that are difficult to overcome in poorer places too. I have an old Dell at home and I won't even try to install Unity on it because it struggles to Windows 10. It's a perfect fine machine for coding with a simple Linux distro.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#354

Post by raxxorrax »

The_rationalist wrote: post #5
pippy wrote: post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

Flash made a lot of things related to vector graphics more accessible. The vector engine was quite powerful, although lacking proper hardware support, it was quite CPU hungry.

Still, I don't think we have an adequate replacement, even it would be technically possible, I don't know about similar tools for vector animations..

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#355

Post by Crinus »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #88
hunta2097 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for frame…

Wickeditor is meant to be something like that: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

It looks kinda interesting but the apparent mobile-oriented interface makes it highly unusable (and wastes a ton of screen space). The "legacy" version that used a more compact UI, menu bar and right click menus is much easier and faster to use (it took me a lot of time to figure out how to add a keyframe with the mobile-oriented interface which basically was moving my mouse over everything i thought was an interactive element to see a tooltip about what it does -- ironically this most likely wont be possible on a mobile device).

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#356

Post by fastball »

koonsolo wrote: post #307
fastball wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.

That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.

Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#357

Post by krapp »

Sendotsh wrote: post #181
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news. For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling): - For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native)…

Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name. It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles. It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with…

Game Maker was my first approach at "serious" programming after messing around with javascript in the browser (not that I ever finished anything, mind you.)

But I would suggest Godot as an alternative for beginners now. Even though I don't like the proprietary scripting languages either uses by default, between GML and GDScript, the latter seems more powerful, and thus more educational. You can do "drag and drop and make a game for some defnition of a 'game'" in any of the modern game frameworks. But really, that only teaches you how to use the GUI, not how programming works.

Also Godot has a version that uses C#, and there are bindings for other languages out there (I don't know how complete or useful they are, though) whereas unless I'm wrong, with Game Maker you're stuck with GML.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#358

Post by majewsky »

wongarsu wrote: post #182
l_t wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why: I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing…

Flash as an authoring tool is very much alive; Hasbro's infamous My Little Pony tv series is animated in Flash, to give a random example. It's a great animation tool with a great learning curve, I'm surprised Adobe isn't doing more to get it in the hands of teenagers^w young creators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#359

Post by madiathomas »

Flash is one of those technologies that I refused to learn. It was in fashion when I was still starting my career in Software Development. I didn't like the experience on websites using flash. I saw Flash and other similar technologies as cancers to the web. I didn't want to be part of the problem.
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